Alexina Duchamp, widow of French artist Marcel Duchamp, died at her home in Villiers-sous-Grez, near Paris, on Wednesday. She was 89. As a former daughter-in-law of Henri Matisse, the widow of Marcel Duchamp and a close friend of John Cage and Jasper Johns, she was in her later years the unquestioned doyenne of the survivors of a great age in art, dance and music. Mrs. Duchamp had close ties to Philadelphia and took pride in being an honorary trustee of its...

Rene Magritte: "Time Transfixed," 1938. For me, one of the most important works in the collection is Rene Magritte's "Time Transfixed," a realistically painted but thoroughly unrealistic image of a locomotive crashing through a fireplace. It's an icon and a surprising, magical image that will have fresh new context set against the wondrous backdrop of Millennium Park. Stephanie D'Alessandro, curator of modern art, medieval to modern European painting and sculpture - - - ...

THE FIND: "Les Mains Libres" ("The Free Hands," 1937), a book of drawings by Man Ray, with poems of Paul Eluard and hand bound by Mary Reynolds (1891-1950). The binding is made of tan morocco (goatskin), kid gloves, pink sponge rubber (inside lining) and silk endpapers. PROVENANCE: The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries (The Art Institute of Chicago) received the book in 1955 as a gift from Frank B. Hubachek, the brother of Mary Louise Hubachek Reynolds. THE SURREAL THING: An American...

REVIEW DUCHAMP . Although named for an artist generally associated with Surrealism and Dadaism, Duchamp restaurant (as in Marcel Duchamp) is surprisingly down to earth. There's nothing surreal about the food at the Bucktown spot, though chef/partner Michael Taus manages a few twists on the menu, such as the "fish and chips" that involves skate wing, garlic-romano fries and no bread. Everything is familiar and accessible. And even a starving artist could afford to eat here; main...

The Art Institute of Chicago has bought Salvador Dali's 1936 "Venus de Milo with Drawers," one of the rarest and most important sculptures in the artist's output and a key object in Surrealism. The piece, which was made from a commercial half-size plaster reproduction of the famous marble from antiquity, introduces six drawers from forehead to knee with white mink pompoms as drawer pulls. The work was a highlight of the retrospective observing last year's centenary of Dali's birth.

Now more than ever, Bucktown needs its neighborhood restaurants. Down the street from Duchamp -- the globally influenced American spot that opened two weeks ago in the former Meritage space -- Potbelly, Chipotle and Dairy Queen dot a once franchise-free strip. Don't get us wrong. We like a Peanut Buster Parfait as much as the next guy. It's just that standing in line to grab a quick bite alongside folks who are too busy rehashing recent purchases at Bebe to say "hello" doesn't feel all that neighborly.

Arman, the French sculptor known internationally for his surprising accumulations of trash and found objects, died Saturday at his home in New York. He was 76. The cause was cancer, according to his wife, Corice Canton Arman. A founding member of the Nouveau Realistes, a group that included Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely, Mr. Arman made his mark in the 1960s. For a famous exhibition in 1960 at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris he responded to Klein's exhibition "La Vide" ("The Void")

The Art Institute of Chicago has bought Salvador Dali's 1936 "Venus de Milo with Drawers," one of the rarest and most important sculptures in the artist's output and a key object in Surrealism. The piece, which was made from a commercial half-size plaster reproduction of the famous marble from antiquity, introduces six drawers from forehead to knee with white mink pompoms as drawer pulls. The work was a highlight of the retrospective observing last year's centenary of Dali's birth.

Two mind-expanding exhibitions, one exploring local communities in America and another the weird mind of Marcel Duchamp, go on view this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Opening Saturday, "Indivisible: Stories of American Community" is a multi-media show combining images by leading photographers with interviews by folklorists and oral historians in an intensive and illuminating focus on 12 different locales in the United States, from...

Arman, the French sculptor known internationally for his surprising accumulations of trash and found objects, died Saturday at his home in New York. He was 76. The cause was cancer, according to his wife, Corice Canton Arman. A founding member of the Nouveau Realistes, a group that included Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely, Mr. Arman made his mark in the 1960s. For a famous exhibition in 1960 at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris he responded to Klein's exhibition "La Vide" ("The Void")

LYING LOW By Diane Johnson (Plume $12.95) Four people--a man and three women--share a Victorian mansion in Sacramento, and they all have something to hide. FALLING ANGELS By Barbara Gowdy (Soho Press $12) Three sisters are bound together by the need to protect their alcoholic mother and the fear of their abusive father. RHODE ISLAND RED By Charlotte Carter (Serpent's Tail $12.99) This New York thriller has been described as "the story of a Spike Lee...

THE FIND: "Les Mains Libres" ("The Free Hands," 1937), a book of drawings by Man Ray, with poems of Paul Eluard and hand bound by Mary Reynolds (1891-1950). The binding is made of tan morocco (goatskin), kid gloves, pink sponge rubber (inside lining) and silk endpapers. PROVENANCE: The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries (The Art Institute of Chicago) received the book in 1955 as a gift from Frank B. Hubachek, the brother of Mary Louise Hubachek Reynolds. THE SURREAL THING: An American...

One of the most popular art exhibitions ever to be shown in England, "Victorian Fairy Painting" (no laughter, please -- it's delightful), has moved from London's Royal Academy of Art to New York's prestigious Frick Collection, 1 E. 70th St. (212-288-0700), where it will be on view from Wednesday through Jan. 17. Whether inspired by Shakespeare's plays, the myths of antiquity or fairy tales familiar and obscure, these 30-odd paintings and works on paper range from the endearing to...

Emmanuel Radnitzky, a wavering student of architecture, engineering and painting, was born in Philadelphia in 1890. Man Ray, a leading painter, sculptor, photographer and filmmaker, came 19 years later. How the one metamorphosed into the other is the subject of "Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray," the revelatory traveling exhibition that recently opened at the Terra Museum of American Art. In the mid-1970s, the Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a large survey of photographs,...

Strange bedfellows are to be found in art as well as politics. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has opened "In Resonance," a very special exhibition focusing on the odd collaboration between Montparnasse madcap Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), a Dadist and Surrealist known as much for his outgoing bonhomie as for the radical ingenuity of his art, and Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), an important but lesser known American artist as quiet, withdrawn and introspective as Duchamp was not. They met in New York in 1933 and...

By Marc Spiegler. Marc Spiegler, who is based in Zurich, writes regularly about artists and the art market | November 9, 2003

Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo By Gregory Curtis Knopf, 237 pages, $24 Standing before Classical artworks, our thoughts often veer toward the eternal. That's understandable. These paintings and statues have captivated viewers for centuries, if not millenniums, through wars, famines and revolutions. In their presence, we feel connected to their creators and to all those who conserved these pieces for our benefit. Emotionally, that's a warm thought; intellectually, it's pretty fuzzy.

Art is timeless, but timepieces can be art. On Wednesday, New York's Frick Collection will open "The Art of the Timekeeper," an exhibition of rare and fabulous clocks and watches from the Winthrop Kellogg Edey collection. Ranging from the 16th through 19th Centuries, these pre-digital treasures reflect the advances in timepiece technology over that unmodern period, and the part the clocks and watches played in the advance of civilization. Many of these works have not been on public view...

"Debating American Modernism: Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-Garde" is one of the best exhibitions to have appeared at the Terra Museum of American Art both for the interest of its premises and the quality of the art chosen to illustrate them. When the museum closes a year from now, this is the kind of show we will be the poorer without. Nearly a century after the rise of the first American avant-garde, there finally is an exhibition that succinctly outlines the...

When it debuted at New York's Armory Show of modern art in 1913, Marcel Duchamp's masterwork "Nude Descending A Staircase" incensed observers. To some, Duchamp's painting, which reduced the classic female nude to a series of superimposed planes, resembled multiple-exposure photography; to others, it suggested slabs of meat. It seemed that, to reproduce his model's movements, Duchamp might have eviscerated the original. In Doug Wright's dark 1993 comedy...

Prop: Vintage Raleigh bicycle, badly dented Appearing in: "A Duchampian Romp, even," at the Neo-Futurarium theater Background: The rickety bike Neo-Futurist John Pierson pedals in "A Duchampian Romp, even" is the product of two good questions: If conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp exhibited a bicycle wheel as art, there must be a story behind it. And two: What are the dramatic possibilities of falling face-first off a speeding bike? Pierson found the bicycle, an ancient Raleigh, as...